On the borders of literacy and orality

From the introduction to the book I passed around yesterday, Oral Performance, Popular Tradition, and Hidden Transcript in Q:

Pioneering scholars such as Werner Kelber, recognizing just how inappropriate were the assumptions of print culture still being followed in classical form-critical analysis, sought ways to understand the sayings of Jesus more adequately as oral performance. It is now being recognized in Gospel studies as in the study of ancient literature more generally that whether or not they existed in written form, texts were recited aloud before groups of people.

This is getting into my part of the discussion, the borderland between literate and oral cultures. That can be, as in archaic Greece, a society where writing is just being introduced. It can also be a society where writing is of long standing (the alphabet was invented in Canaan) but where literacy is primarily limited to educated elites, as has been the case for the majority of recorded history.

I will add (off-topic) that knowing what we now know about the nature of oral transmission has certain very profound implications for the history of early Christianity. It is widely recognized that none of Jesus' teachings were written down in his lifetime; the earliest extant writings associated with Christianity (the letters of Paul, plus the Q literature) date from some twenty years later. The earliest form of the Passion narrative is some twenty years later than these. Given, for example, the tendency in oral societies traditions to fit their traditions to their needs, do these saying reflect Jesus' teaching -- or the needs of the Christian community decades later?